So, I picked this up the other day when I picked up SC:DA and it’s been pretty awesome so far. IT was between this and Titan Quest and I’m fairly confident I made the right decision.
IF you played either of the X-men Legends games, you know if you’ll like this or not. I fond XM:L2 pretty enjoyable on the PC, but never finished it because the point and click combat system got pretty boring. This time around I didn’t even try it and jumped right into playing with a gamepad. This is the only way to play this game as far as I’m concerned.
Essentially, you’re put into this scenario where a bunch of Marvel heroes have to band together to fight off an ultimate menace, and you have the luxury of forming whatever team you want out of 30 or so characters (some of which are not available at the start). Much like legends, each character plays differently enough that new teams actually still feel fresh. Sure, there are the standard arch-types like the tank, the “magic user” (usually a telepath or someone with projectile powers), the “average dude” (a.k.a. Captain America, Spiderman, Wolverine), and so on.
The thing is that the powers of the characters within these archetypes vary enough that they aren’t really all that similar. IE, Spiderman can web sling around, tie enemies up with webs, hit them with web balls, swing bad guys around into walls, and things like that. As you can imagine those powers don’t translate well to other characters. Wolverine’s surround his claws and bezerk ability (dash around everywhere clawing the fuck out of people), and Cap’s involve his shield (Throw it and control where it bounces around the room to, dash with it into fools). Not completely different, but different enough that each has their own strengths and weaknesses.
There is also a focus on team-based play where your team “melds” increasing each of your own individual abilities the longer you’re together and the more damage you do. This is on top of the system outlined in Legends where if you picked a team of certain heroes, you’d get a team name and Stat bonus (Like having all four characters on a team with Age of Apocalypse skins giving some sort of stat or damage bonus). You can even set your team up with a custom name and symbol…you know, just to make things official. There’s also a penalty if you switch characters too much once you do this.
The game looks good on PC, but at a price. Basically the game was released for every gaming device out there, from the PSP to the PS3. The PC version has the capability of looking as good as the PS3/360 option, or more like the classic Xbox/PS2 version. I’ve tried both, and while the ‘next gen’ graphics (which are basically enabled through a one-click option and messing with the ‘shadow detail’ slider) looks good, it also runs pretty slow on my 7900GS. I couldn’t consistently hold down 30+ fps in action heavy segments at any reasonable resolution with this enabled.
The ‘non-next gen’ option is somewhat less visibly pleasing. It doesn’t really have the cell-shaded look of legends, but uses the same graphic engine (and you can still see some remnants like item pick ups looking cell shaded). There are no bump-maps or specular lighting, but the effects in general are quite a bit nicer than those of X-men Legends. The game runs like a dream in this mode, where with everything but ‘advanced lighting and shadow detail’ bumped up to the max, I was getting over 100fps with 4xAA at 1680x1050. In the end, it’s a bit of a shame that the higher end graphics don’t run faster, but I’ll try it again after getting a 8 or 9 series card. Besides, all the advanced lighting makes the environment look great, but the characters themselves come off looking like cheesy movie heroes decked out in oil-covered latex instead of bad-ass comic characters.
Anyways, if you liked X-men legends or are just looking for a new rpg/beat-em-up, try this out. The main game is solid and there are a ton of bonus solo missions, alternate costumes, unlockables and mods (something like over 100 characters have been added by the mod community) to keep you busy.
